Shaw Media plans to launch B.C.'s first all-day news channel

Jill Krop tapped to headline prime-time show in major move for television market share

Shaw Media has announced preparations to launch B.C.'s first all-day news channel featuring a prime time talk show hosted by Global BC anchor Jill Krop.

Photograph by: Handout
, Global

Shaw Media’s application to launch a Global BC-driven all-news channel in B.C. is more about scrambling for bandwidth than providing a new news outlet, a Simon Fraser University marketing professor said.

“There are pressures to control more bandwidth and bandwidth for TV is the creme de la creme and can easily be converted later to an Internet feed,” Lindsay Meredith said. “In the end, you can turn that into all kinds of different feeds. Down the line you have some flexibility ...”

Shaw Media announced its application to the Canadian Radio-Television Communications Commission yesterday. The as-yet-unnamed specialty channel will operate out of Global B.C.’s newsroom and is expected to launch this summer.

The channel’s final format is still being discussed, but it will provide headline as well as contextual news, and an evening prime time talk show hosted by veteran Global BC anchor Jill Krop, said Kenton Boston, Global BC station manager and senior director of Global national news who will be responsible for content on the new channel.

“There will be a full offering of the product through mobile and online, tablets, smartphones,” he said. “We’re offering products to people when they want it, in the form they want it.”’

Boston hinted at creative mobile offerings. “Imagine if you’re able on a mobile device, to watch TV or whatever,” he said. “Or the ability to pick five entertainment headlines from the Vancouver Film Festival while sitting on the SkyTrain or walking around Pacific Centre.”

Shaw is looking to launch an all-news station at a time when news media are struggling with slashed budgets, Meredith said. “This is all about marketing strategy, about first-mover strategy — taking a position you think is going to be valuable even if down the line you have to change the nature of your programming to make it marketable viable.”

“This is all about market control and the market is all about communications, and that means TVs, telephones and computers,” Meredith said.

The new channel may also be a first volley in a major challenge to the CRTC.

Kathleen Cross, a lecturer with SFU’s school of communications sees Shaw and Global’s news channel as an attempt to push deregulation of the Broadcast Act.

“The CRTC has said you can go out and create content and use broadcast content over the Internet,” Cross said. “I think what they are doing is they are testing their ability to create broadcast content or use broadcast content that no longer meets the Broadcast Act and to see if it’s a good business model.”

The CRTC announced in 2009 and confirmed last fall that it did not plan to regulate broadcast content over the Internet, Cross said. In the meantime, Shaw bought Global BC and Bell bought CTV.

“So what you’ve got is this convergence of the carrier and the content producer which up until then had been significantly separated,” Cross said.

“The fact that it’s an all-news channel is probably one of the easiest ways to do it.

“If you control both the content and the delivery, you have a bigger piece of the pie and you also potentially have a lot more influence,” Cross said.

Boston said he will be hiring additional staff but is not yet sure of the number.

The new channel could mean 30 to 50 new jobs ranging from editorial to production, Bill Amos, a TV news instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s Broadcast/Online Journalism Program

“It’s not going to be 24 hours of hard news,” Amos predicted. He predicts a mix of some hard news plus feature and interview segments in sports, weather, entertainment and politics to fill programming holes.

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